Event Details

In a 1956 ARTnews article, critic Hubert Crehan asked “Is There a California School?” and answered with a resounding “No,” claiming that the Abstract Expressionist school around the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI) was too disparate and incoherent to constitute a “school.” The same year, Richard Diebenkorn actually made a case for a San Francisco School of Figuration in a symposium at the Oakland Art Museum.

In conjunction with ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND, Renny Pritikin, former chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Natasha Boas, exhibition curator of ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND, will reproduce the historic symposium, posing an updated question for 2013: Mission School: Yes or No? The panel will consider how defining a “school” or movement affects history, art-making, and localism. Come prepared to voice your opinions—responses will be recorded in the catalogue produced for the traveling exhibition.

Panelists will include: Kevin Killian, author; Dena Beard, associate curator, BAM/PFA; Ruby Neri, artist in ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND; and David Kasprzak, associate curator of Will Brown.

____________

ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND features early and formative work by five artists—Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, and Ruby Neri—who began their careers in the early 1990s in San Francisco’s Mission District and, by the early aughts, had been identified and celebrated as key members of the so-called Mission School.